One Sunday at Applebee’s after church in the early 2000s, several of my young adult Sunday school classmates and I found ourselves discussing Jehovah’s Witnesses, a few of whom I had worked with on my previous job. I defended them as legitimately saved Christians, despite having theological disagreements with them. In response to my… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Christian Critiques
Flaunting your body – how it’s harmful to others
… Flaunting your body – how it’s harmful to others. Nothing says Christmas like America erupting over Miley Cyrus wearing a revealing outfit on the Christmas episode of Saturday Night Live. In fact, the outfit wasn’t just revealing; it was absurd. Nobody in public wears a coat with no shirt underneath. You wear a… Read more »
Revelation’s Beast – Where the Religious Right Gets it Wrong
… If you’ve spent many years of your life in or around conservative Evangelical Churches, you’ve heard plenty of speculation about who the Beast is in the Book of Revelation. Usually, you’ll hear them say it’s a person, like Barack Obama or the Pope, or that it’s an entity, like the U.N. or the Roman… Read more »
The Protestant Case for Purgatory
… Let me start by saying this: I have never been Roman Catholic a day in my life, nor have any of my close relatives. But having spent my young adult life in the Bible Belt, Evangelicals drilled into my brain the idea that we Christians were to enthusiastically study the Bible on our own…. Read more »
How obsessing over grace creates selfish Christians
… For the last 40 years, I’ve heard over and over from pastors and Christian writers that they have a new and wonderful message for us. And that message is that God’s grace is all we need; we can’t have too much of God’s grace; all we need is God’s love; God loves you so… Read more »
Obama Was a Test for Christians, and Most Evangelicals Failed It!
… In 2008, I was active in a Christian writers’ group. One day, when discussing the direction of the nation, the leader of the group warned us that “we are being bamboozled” as it looked likely that Obama would become president. With Obama having the middle name, Hussein, Christians couldn’t help but ask, “Could we… Read more »
5 Reasons why Rachel Maddow’s lesbianism is NO reason for Christians to reject her show
… Since Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart left their politically-oriented shows on Comedy Central, the only cable news/punditry show I watch on a daily basis is “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC. When I mention this to conservatives, especially of the Christian variety (although not always), they’ll say something like, “Isn’t she a lesbian?” And… Read more »
The biblical case for the rich being the least righteous class
… [This is an excerpt from my book, Rescuing Religion from Republicans] Are the Rich More Righteous? According to 2012 Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, the corporate capitalist free market system “not only produces wealth but also virtuous people whose worldly enterprise complements the work of the Creator.” Unfortunately, many Christians hold this same… Read more »
Movie “God is Not Dead” escalates culture wars rather than turning the other cheek
[I wrote the following article a couple years ago after seeing the original “God is Not Dead”, but never published it. Now that “God is Not Dead II” has come out, and there has been some controversy over it and SNL’s parody of it, I figure there’s no time like the present to publish it,… Read more »
Why it’s wrong for Christians to blame the poor for their poverty
… No one better summed up the modern-day Republican stance on personal responsibility than Herman Cain did while running for president in 2012. He said, “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! It is not a person’s fault because they succeeded;… Read more »